Al Jazeera:Taliban controls Korengal Valley after withdrawal of American forces- Kunar province

that's been my thought from the beginning.

Warn the Elders: “you allow the Taliban to use your village to fire on us, we will flatten your village.”

first village that let's the Taliban in to fight us, send ‘em a warning - 15 minutes to clear the village - and then blast it to gravel.

Bet they wouldn't have had to pulverize more than one village.

And then put in enough ANA to help them keep their villages clear of the Taliban.

For some reason, it seems our soldiers just weren't allowed to ‘clear’ the valley. Who knows why? Maybe just keeping the fighting going on there in order to keep the Tallies busy up there? but by using our soldiers as Judas Goats?

Korengal Valley has never ben taken either by Russians or any other country for that matter. It's a cold nasty place and the villagers love to filet alive...ask the Brits who wrote the book on that sh**hole place.

I hope we( or someone since good men seemingly are doing nothing but following dumb orders) just carpet bomb the whole lousy vally and nothing lives for the rest of eternity.

In the Al Jazera clip, you hear villagers, surrounded by the Taliban, say they never wanted the Americans there. I believe it may be more a case of their being caught between a rock and a hard place.

There's a bit more to it than that. The Korengal Valley is a logging area that once supplied much of the wood to Afghanistan. Most of the logging in the valley was controlled by a single family, and the employment and economy in the valley was largely dependent on them.

When we first moved into that part of Afghanistan, a nearby warlord who also controlled some logging facilities saw an opportunity. He accused the head of the Korengal logging family of being a Taliban leader, and the various facilities as being Taliban facilities. So we dropped JDAM's on his mills, killed a bunch of millworkers, and built our firebase on one of his mill sites. Then, for good measure, we bombed his house to try and kill him. We missed, but we did take out his wives and children.

We later figured out that he wasn't actually Taliban (oops), but the damage was done. The guy was one of the top elders in the valley and wielded an enormous amount of control, and that one accident made him our enemy. He ordered everyone in the valley to support and aid anyone who was fighting against the Americans, and they never stopped following that order.

We tend to shrug off collateral casualties as an acceptable cost of warfare, but in this case it had unfortunate results that impeded our own plans for the valley. In most of Afghanistan, it's the Arab-Paki dominated Taliban vs. the U.S., with ordinary Afghanis caught in the crossfire. In the Korengal, even the ordinary Afghanis wanted us dead.

Freeper's treating Al Jazeera as a reliable News Source. What's next, CNN?

this was not a WRITTEN article OK? This is a VIDEO -

but if you want to look at other reports - GOOGLE is your friend - and no one is stopping you from using it.

Here's a few - but you can find more by using different search words - have at it

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&pwst=1&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS305US305&ei=BkjOS4O3GYX6lwerzKWiCw&sa=X&oi=spellfullpage&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=2&ved=0CAgQvwUoAQ&q=Taliban+in+Korengal&spell=1

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